#CHIPS: "Yellowstone Supercomputer Sports Massive Xeon E5 Array"

Long past is the era when faster supercomputers depended on faster system clocks. In fact, the next generation of faster supercomputers are turning down the clock--to save power--and instead multiplying the number of cores to achieve their performance boost. Witness the lower clock speed of the petaFLOPS-class supercomputer called Yellowstone which is being assembled by IBM using a massive array of Intel Xeon processors for introduction next month by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): R. Colin Johnson


Yellowstone, the newest supercomputer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is now fully assembled and undergoing testing for its debut next month.

A supercomputer with a massive array of Intel Xeon E5 cores will debut next month, multiplying by 29 times the computing power at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Called Yellowstone, the 1.5 petaFLOPS supercomputer at NCAR’s Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC, Cheyenne) will be used by the Computational and Information Systems Lab for weather forecasting, the development of detailed climate models and other critical environmental research.


The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has a new Yellowstone supercomputer which houses 72,288 Intel Xeon E5 cores in its main computing array (center) with dedicated data-analysis and visualization (DAV) resources (Geyser and Caldera respectively, left) and a Globally Accessible Data Environment--GLADE (right).

Yellowstone has been under development for several years at NCAR–long before Intel announced its Xeon Phi 50+ multi-core coprocessors due this fall–but already NCAR is planning to evaluate Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture for follow-on systems to Yellowstone...
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